The person introducing Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story at the Hot Docs Festival raised audience expectations when she said the film was ‘perfect.’ But after many laughs, and even more tears, I have to admit, she was right. Billy & Molly is a story of love and friendship told with sincerity and humour. […]
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Dariush Mehrjui’s Leila is a mosaic of two families – one Reza’s (Ali Mossafa), an Iranian who has an austere family. The other is of the semi-modern Leila’s (Leila Hatami), an artsy bourgeois family, so I like them better. Within that mosaic is a psychological portrait of a titular character facing social pressures to bear […]
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Capturing nature’s beauty, it bears repeating, may be easy for filmmakers, but that may not be the same for people. This isn’t to say that the characters in Philippe Muyl’s The Butterfly are unsympathetic, there are worse films. I’ll remember what I didn’t like in a film that is mostly fine, but let’s get to […]
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Bigger isn’t always better! Need proof of that claim? Look no further than the short documentaries at this year’s Hot Docs. Short docs can make you laugh, cry, and curse the world just as well as feature-length films can! Here’s a list of three shorts we’re still thinking about a long while after we watched […]
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The brief for the program is “Power, sexual freedom, and the politics of standing up for what you believe in”. Sometimes the documentary filmmakers point the camera at themselves, telling their own stories. And at others, they point the camera to the world that grows at a different pace than their subjects, which the subjects […]
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Aqueronte – Manuel Muñoz Rivas What does it really mean to feel connected? Is it as simple as sharing a space and working together toward a common goal? Picture passengers on a ferry, crossing vast waters. Each person, in their own way, is trying to make time fly by, all united in the journey ahead […]
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As a middle millennial, I only remember the tail end of the Yugoslavian Wars, the air strikes. Living in an anti-American household, America was bad, Yugoslavia was good, but even my father saw nuance. It was the first time I heard the term ethnic cleansing, the thing Milosevic inflicted upon the Bosnians – Srebrenica is […]
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There’s a difficulty in making any topic interesting and I’m deliberating on whether this documentary accomplishes this. As documentaries do, it tells its story through its images, like the high angle shot of the Atlantic. The Atlantic’s isolating infinity somehow reflects the feeling of its main subject, retired Cape Verdean fisherman Mr. Quirino. Mr. Quirino […]
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Disco’s Revenge is a glorious deep cut reminder of how the great unifiers in our world are born out of love rather than hate. Writer/Directors Omar Majeed and Peter Mishara take audiences well beyond the surface veneer of Disco to remind us of the music’s origins born from the social upheaval of Stonewall and the […]
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Peter Porta’s The Click Trap dives headfirst into the muddy waters of online advertising and tracking algorithms, trying to decipher and disseminate them in a way that makes them more accessible to the general public. From explaining how your phone can seemingly know exactly what you want to buy next before you even make a […]
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